


Absolution

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-24
Updated: 2006-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:42:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Absolution

She can't stay with him, can't spend the night in his bunk, because the regs might bend, here in orbit around the new world, but Lee isn't going to let them break. They're not married, not by law, and if they were she wouldn't be allowed to stay here, under his command. Either way, she'd only wake up next to him on the rare occasions their R&R synchs up, and at least this way she has moments like these, off-duty moments before she returns to her own bunk, quiet oddly-tender moments where the Commander of the Pegasus is a tired and gentle man, and hers.

She sits on his bunk, her legs forming a cradle for his head, her fingertips grazing over the delicate skin above his ears and through the hair that's grown out soft and rumpled. Her whole life, her most noteworthy trait-- her gift, she supposes with indifference-- has been that she listens, listens in a way that makes others want to speak, and Lee is no different. He rests in her lap and he talks to her, a soft murmuring rise and fall of voice that weaves out his past and his dreams and his fears. She strokes his hair and she listens and she very rarely offers any words in return, because that's not her place. Not what they want her for. They want benevolent absolution, and silence is easily confused with a higher state of grace.

Dee is nothing holy, spent no more time in a temple than any other child from her district, but she is quiet, and that's close enough on a ship of war. People tell her their secrets, and expect that she won't pass them on, and she doesn't, because after all, no one expects or desires that she will speak.

That isn't fair; Lee asks her questions, and listens to her, and she can't recall a single time he's ever asked her _not_ to talk. But habits form young and die hard, and her habit is to sit, and soothe, and listen, and let others find salvation in the telling.

He's talking about Zak, now, as he often does, telling stories about their childhood games and fights and triumphs. She traces the curve of his eyebrow, upside-down in her view, and lets his words wash around her, through her mind lazy as the waves of Sagittaron's sea, picking up the flotsam and jetsam of other things she's heard, over the years. Sentences that the Old Man cut off half-spoken, words that Starbuck drowned half-born in a bottle. And Lee's own words, old stories told before, echoing back through her head and fitting together into half-finished puzzles. She thinks that maybe if she spent an hour like this with each of the other two, letting them flesh out those half-stories into wholes, she could rebuild Zak Adama as a plaster saint, the most idealized of men.

"He was a good kid," Lee says, blinking sleepily up at her. She brushes his overgrown hair back from his forehead, says nothing, watches his eyes slowly drift closed. She'll sit until his breath is slow and even, then ease him over to his pillow, kiss his cheek, and go back to her own bunk for the night. Bend the regs, not break. That's how it works on an Adama's ship, out here.

She thinks, in a vague and dispassionate way like most of her thoughts in these still moments at the end of the day, that if she ever had met Zak Adama, she wouldn't have cared for him much. Anyone who lingers so persistently as a ghost must have been unbearable as a man.  



End file.
